by Libby Howard
“And if she ingested as well as inhaled the water, it might not be easy to tell from the contents of her stomach.” I eyed the report, wondering if they did blood tests back then.
“Well, here’s what you were looking for.” The judge turned the papers around and pointed to one paragraph. “She wasn’t pregnant.”
No evidence of having previously given birth. Not pregnant at the time of death. All pelvic structures are intact and there was no indication of violation or recent activity. Then the report went on to list a whole bunch of medical mumbo-jumbo that I couldn’t understand.
Wait. “It says all pelvic structures are intact. That sounds to me like she was a virgin. What else could that mean?”
Judge Beck shrugged. “I can’t imagine anything else, but I can send the M.E. a quick text and ask him. Maybe she was a virgin.”
“But the police chief saw her. Silas Albright was seated with his pants down, and she was straddling him. If he wasn’t…you know, then why would she be in a position like that? It’s not like they’d be involved in…other things with her sitting on his naked lap.”
This was turning into a rather embarrassing conversation to be having with my roommate. And then it hit me.
“Lucille and Mabel were twins. The police chief saw her from the back, then a brief profile at night in a park. What if it wasn’t Lucille that was having an affair with Silas, but Mabel? What if the police chief just assumed it was Lucille, because she was the wild party girl, and he never would have expected shy, almost-engaged Mabel to be having sex with a married man?”
Judge Beck stared at me. “Kay, that would make Mabel a truly horrible person. Not only would she have married Harlen Hansen while she was pregnant with another man’s child, but if I’m calculating things correctly, she continued to have an affair with Silas after she was caught, after she’d gotten engaged. And she let her sister take the blame for her indiscretion. She let her sister get kicked out of the house into the streets, wrongfully accused of being the one having sex in the park with Silas. Then she continued to have that affair, got pregnant, and refused to help her sister, leading to her suicide.”
“I know.” It made me sick to think of it. No fancy tombstone could ever make up for that. If it were true, Mabel could beg for forgiveness all she wanted. As far as I was concerned, she wouldn’t receive it.
“Maybe they both were a bit wild, and Evie was just blind to Mabel’s actions because they were friends and she hid it better than Lucille. Maybe I’m wrong about the coroner’s report, and Lucille wasn’t a virgin at her death.”
The judge’s phone beeped and he looked down at the screen. “Or maybe the M.E. back in 1926 was a complete idiot and couldn’t tell an intact hymen from a broken one. I’m gonna take this down to our morgue and see if we’re missing anything. I just don’t want to believe that Mabel was capable of such evil.”
Neither did I.
Chapter 17
“So,” Judge Beck said as he came through the door with the ever-present box of files in his hands. The guy hadn’t even set his work down and he was clearly eager to tell me his news.
“So? I take it you went down to the morgue this afternoon and showed Lucille’s autopsy to the M.E.?”
“Yes. It seems quite possible that Lucille was a virgin. Whoever did the autopsy was a bit of a prude, and unfortunately didn’t spell it out with enough clarity for us to be positive, but it appears that’s what he meant when he said that her pelvic area was intact. Phil said that it might be possible that the couple hadn’t achieved complete penetration when they were interrupted.”
“Or it wasn’t her,” I added.
“Or it wasn’t her.” The judge sat down his box. “I still don’t want to believe that. It’s not just Mabel who let her sister take the blame, but that Silas guy, too.”
I didn’t want to believe it, either. I could see that maybe Mabel, pregnant and scared, had agreed to marry Harlen and had turned her sister away, but not this. This was just too terrible.
“There’s more,” the judge told me. “Phil said that from what he’s reading in the autopsy report, it should have been listed as a murder, not as a suicide.”
I blinked a few times. “What? What are you talking about? She didn’t have any wounds. What do you mean murder?”
“Phil said there were some notes of what he’d call defensive wounds around her fingernails where she’d clawed and scratched, and that there was petechial hemorrhaging that indicated she was held under water, strangled, then when the murderer let up, she instinctively inhaled water and drowned.”
And now my thoughts were going in a completely different direction. Murdered. Someone murdered Lucille and covered it up to make it look like a suicide. But who would want her dead? Mabel, if she was worried that Lucille would claim it wasn’t her with Silas, especially if the sister had something that would prove it was Mabel who’d been in the park with the man. Or the father who might have been enraged enough to kill Lucille if she persisted in hanging around town after he’d kicked her out. Or Silas. Or Silas’s wife.
A married man who’d just had news of his affair splashed across the gossip page of the paper. His wife might not believe him if he told her the affair was over, but with Lucille dead…. And if Mabel was his lover, then he could continue on with her and no one would know differently.
Or his wife—a big, burly and strong wife if she managed to drown Lucille—determined to make sure her husband never strayed again.
I pulled out my laptop, deciding that the roast in the oven could stay there a bit longer. Plopping down at the table, I pulled up the newspaper archives and searched for Silas Albright.
There was the damning gossip column about the indiscretion in the park. And there, in March, was an obituary. I stared at it, completely confused at this point as to what had happened ninety years ago. March. Lucille died in June, so Silas was hardly her murderer. And his wife would have little reason to murder Lucille three months after her husband had died. Was it Lucille’s sister? Her father? Had she out of desperation turned to prostitution or some other illegal activity that ended in her murder? I glanced up at the ghost hovering in the corner and wished once more that she would tell me.
Maybe it was time to get Olive back. Maybe if I asked Mabel some very pointed questions, she’d let me know what happened and tell me what I needed to do so she could move on and get out of my dining room.
I’d text Daisy later. In the meantime, I pulled up Silas Albright’s obituary and nearly fell out of my chair. Right in front of me was a picture of a handsome man. And there was no denying the resemblance between him and the picture of Eleonore from the wedding photo Maurice had shown me.
Lucille might or might not have been a virgin, but it was clear who Eleonore’s father had been. And if Mabel had been sleeping with Silas Albright, then she not only deceived Harlen, but she had let her sister take the blame for her activities in the park that night.
I glanced over at Evie’s journals. How could someone be so blind to their friend’s doings? She’d known Mabel was pregnant out of wedlock. Hadn’t Mabel told her best friend about Silas? Hadn’t she confessed that it had been her that night? Evie must have known. Was she just as horrible a person as Mabel?
Saving the picture of Silas, I continued to read the obituary, my stomach dropping with every line. He had been twenty-five, married and no kids. He’d worked at Edwin’s Tool and Dye and had graduated from Milford High. But the obituary wasn’t the only mention of Silas Albright in the paper archives. A week before the obituary, an article in the paper told that Silas Albright had been found beaten to death in the very park where he’d been caught with Lucille—or Mabel—Stevens. Robbery. He’d fought back, according to the abrasions on his knuckles. But as hard as I searched, I couldn’t find that the police had ever found his murderer.
I got up and went into the kitchen to see Judge Beck. “Hey, do you think that paralegal of yours can check on what might be an unsolved murder
from March of 1926? Silas Albright. He was found robbed and beaten to death in Freedom Park.”
“Sure. Silas Albright was the married lover of at least one of the Stevens girls, right?”
“Yep. And it looks like it was Mabel because Eleonore looked just like him. He died in March, three months before Lucille did.”
Judge Beck looked disgusted at the news. “I thought I liked Mabel, but now I kind of hate her. She has an affair with a married man, lets her sister take the blame for it. Then she gets engaged, keeps on having sex with the married guy on the sly, then marries Harlen before he even realizes she’s pregnant. What a horrible woman.”
“I know. I keep hoping I’ll find something else, something that absolves Mabel of all this, but the deeper I dig, the worse it gets.”
“You keep looking,” the judge told me. “I’ll take care of this roast and make us a salad. I won’t be able to check on Silas’s murder until Monday when my paralegal is back in the office, and I don’t think I can wait that long to find out the rest of this story.”
Me too. I spun around and went back to the dining room table, picking up Evie’s 1926 journal once again. I’d skipped over the early part of the journal and gone straight to June, reading of Lucille’s death, the wedding, then reading on to the pregnancy months.
The date Silas’s body was found, Evie noted that Mabel had come over, that she was upset. She didn’t reveal why, but at the end of the visit, Mabel told Evie that she was going to marry Harlen Hansen.
Wait. Mabel had gotten engaged to Harlen Hansen in January. Had she broken the engagement? Had she planned to, but with the death of Silas, she’d no longer had a reason to reject Harlen? In March, Mabel wouldn’t have known she was pregnant. It would have been too soon.
I looked at the journal, realizing that I couldn’t continue to skip around, that I’d need to read the whole thing front to back because clearly in between the endless recipes and minutiae, I was missing important things.
I was up until after midnight, giving Judge Beck quick updates while he finished up dinner, cleaned the dishes, then sat down with his own work. When I finally scooped up Taco and climbed the stairs to bed, I was shaken, and I knew the judge was equally appalled at what my reading had revealed. Mabel Stevens had told Evie that she’d broken off her engagement with Harlen in February after only being engaged a month. She told her friend that she was in love with someone else, and although she’d tried to forget this man and move on, she didn’t feel it was fair to marry Harlen when her affections lay elsewhere.
This was never announced in the paper. I could only imagine that both Harlen and Mabel’s father thought she’d change her mind. And she had, right after Silas Albright was murdered. Maybe it was a sad coincidence, but I found myself thinking how fortunate for Harlen that his rival, married or not, was taken out of the picture, allowing him to win the hand of Mabel. The joke was on him though, as he’d marry her but he’d end up raising a child that wasn’t his—the child of a man I was thinking he might have had murdered.
And there was something else. A few weeks before her wedding, before Lucille’s drowning, Mabel had given Evie a sealed envelope with instructions to keep it safe and only open it if she died. I searched the rest of the journals, but could find no envelope in any of them. Had Evie eventually destroyed it? Had Mabel asked for it back years later? I had no idea where that envelope was, but I had a feeling it contained the whole story, the one Mabel’s ghost clearly wanted someone to hear.
Chapter 18
Daisy and I both descended on Suzette right after our sunrise yoga, apple spice coffee cake in hand. I didn’t have much time before I needed to begin prepping for the party tonight, but I had to know if Suzette knew anything about this sealed envelope that Mabel had given her great-grandmother.
My neighbor answered the door in her pajamas, hair in a ponytail on top of her head. She let us in the moment she laid eyes on the apple spice cake, and immediately set to work putting on a pot of coffee while I brought her up to speed on what had been in Evie’s journals.
“I remember my grandfather saying when he was a kid, he’d found someone who’d drowned in the pond,” she told us, setting mugs and plates on the table.
“Was that why he never wanted any of us to swim there?” Daisy asked.
“Probably not,” Suzette told us. “He told me he was sure the woman had been murdered, that the pond wasn’t more than five feet deep that summer because they’d had a dry spell. And he was certain he’d heard people out there late the night before. His bedroom was up in the loft and it gets hot as blazes up there. He said he had the window open and could hear people arguing, then splashing, then in the morning when he went out to look for duck eggs, he saw the body.”
“Weren’t you like seven or something when he died?” Daisy asked. “That’s a pretty harsh story for your grandfather to be telling a young child.”
“It was a pretty harsh thing for a young child to find a dead body in the pond,” Suzette countered. “We were working on fixing up the dock together one day and I found a nest of duck eggs. I guess it reminded him and he told me the story then. He was a great one for stories. Like the one about when he won the pie-eating contest at the fair to impress my grandmother, only to throw up right in front of her ten minutes later.”
Daisy snorted. “Men. Only a guy would think a woman would be impressed by how much food he could cram into his stomach in a short amount of time.”
“Feats of competitive gastronomy have always done it for me,” I told Daisy in my best deadpan.
“Personally, I’m fond of a partner who isn’t afraid to put down a pie or two.” Suzette eyed the food on the table. “Or apple crumb cake. Or that gingerbread you brought by the other day. I’m a girl who isn’t ashamed of enjoying quality baking.”
Daisy raised her hands. “Okay, I’m clearly outnumbered here by you gluttons. Did your grandfather do anything else notable in his life beyond speed-eating pie and finding murder victims?”
Suzette brought over the coffee pot and poured us all a mug, then sat down to slice into the cake. “Let’s see…he was quite skilled at marbles when he was young. I still have jars with the ones he won. And he knew how to butcher a hog, although he told me his parents got rid of all the pigs when they sold off the majority of the land here. Oh, and he had a lovely tenor singing voice. Gran always said that was the reason she married him.”
“Not because of his pie-eating skills?” I teased.
She smiled as she put a generous slice of cake on each plate. “I remember him singing me to sleep, and some nights, after I was in bed, I’d hear him singing to Gran. He did have a lovely voice. Wish I had inherited that. All I seem to have as far as my grandfather’s skills is the pie-eating one.”
“It’s a good skill to have.” I took a few bites of the cake, which had turned out quite well, if I did say so myself. I only hoped the lemon cake for the party tonight was just as good.
“Actually, I wanted to ask you something about your great-grandmother,” I said to Suzette after we’d each moved on to a second piece of cake. “She said in one of her journals that Mabel had given her a sealed envelope back in 1926 before Mabel’s wedding to Harlen Hansen, and told your great-grandmother to open it if she died. I wondered if you had come across it at all?”
Suzette paused mid-bite. “An envelope? I didn’t find anything in the house when I went through it after my grandmother’s death. But great-grandmother Evie died in 1945, long before her friend Mabel had. If she wasn’t supposed to open the envelope unless Mabel died, then she wouldn’t have done so. Not like me. I don’t think I would have had the self-discipline not to steam it open and take a peek.”
“Oh, I would have read it too,” Daisy chimed in.
And so would I. Maybe. It would have been a struggle, because if Daisy had given me an envelope like that, my curiosity and desire to know if I could help my friend or not would have warred with the idea that anything she’d wanted me to
know, she would have told me.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t have opened it, that I would have trusted my friend and quite possibly been scared that the contents might reveal something that could forever change the way I saw her. Some things were better off left unknown.
“What happened to your great-grandmother Evie’s things when she passed away?” I asked.
“I wasn’t born then, but I do know Sarah, her daughter and my grandmother, had a box of her things. It had the journals, and some jewelry that Evie’s husband had given her throughout the years. A few pictures. A braid of hair.”
A braid of hair. I remembered Evie pestering her mother to have her long hair cut fashionably short and imagined she’d saved it as some sort of memorabilia.
“Mabel was still alive at the time of your great-grandmother’s death. I’m assuming she came to the funeral. And since your grandmother Sarah and Mabel’s daughter Eleonore were very close, Sarah might have returned an envelope that was obviously written by Mabel?”
“Probably,” Suzette said. “If it was clear on the face of the envelope that it was written by Mabel and that it was private, she wouldn’t have read it. Great-granddad Howard lived until 1967, but he most likely would have had his daughter assist in going through Evie’s personal things. And if the letter was in the journals, there’s a good chance it wasn’t even found until years after Evie’s death. Or ever found at all.”
“I searched all the journals and it wasn’t in there,” I told Suzette. “I can’t imagine that Evie would have kept it elsewhere since it clearly held very personal information. Do you think Mabel would have asked for it back after Evie’s death? Or even after Harlen’s death?”
Harlen had died just months before Evie had. If I was right and Harlen had murdered Silas, then Mabel would no longer have needed to fear him.
And yes, it chilled me to think that Mabel had married and had slept with a man who most likely had murdered her lover.